Have you ever been involved in creating a practice group with all of the jockeying and politics that is involved?

Don’t you just wish that you wish that you could cast it all aside and just “get ‘er done”, as we Texans like to say?

Well, in my little dream world, I would create my own dream team by the following methods:

  1. Be Nick Fury. Right wrongs of injustice with the authority and largesse to assemble the best and the brightest team imaginable.
  2. Engage Iron Man. Not by entrancing him with money, babes or fame–because he has loads on his own–but by being just as smart as he is but acknowledging he’s smarter in a DIFFERENT way.
  3. Appeal to Captain America. Steve Rogers is a good old boy, he loves his country, apple pie and his mom. But not exactly in that order. Appeal to his sense of fairness and justice.
  4. Enrage the Hulk. Bruce Banner needs to get angry. Just show him how unrighteous it all is and watch him explode.
  5. Get Thor. The man is a god. So he’s the easiest–just stroke his ego.
  6. Lure the Black Widow. Natasha Romanoff is every man’s fantasy nightmare–they want her but are afraid of her, all at the same time. Kind of like a roller coaster. How do you seduce the seductress? A little trickier but jewelry and display of glamour may do the trick … 
I know, if it were only that easy, right?

Based on some job ads we have recently seen, it appears Axiom is establishing a presence in Texas. Axiom, as you may recall, is an alternative provider of legal-type services and new breed of competitor to law firms. They have a very interesting business model and have been quite successful in other markets.

Texas firms would be wise to add Axiom to their list of competitors. Axiom provides long-term, temporary attorney placements within client legal teams. This is disruptive for two reasons. First and most obvious, this is work likely being handled currently by outside counsel.  Second, this is a competitor establishing a primary relationship with law firm clients. The first factor is a short-term issue. The second one is very much a long-term concern for firms.

At 3 Geeks we have previously talked about new breed competitors entering the market. Now this appears to be happening geographically and likely by markets (Energy in Houston).

Welcome to Texas Axiom!

I just finished reading David King Keller’s The Associate as Rainmaker: Building Your Business Brain, and I just want to tear it up–but I mean this in a GOOD way.

Full of checklists and step-by-step guides on how to develop your own business development plan, the appendices alone are worth the $100 sticker price.

By reading this book–with our without hiring a business coach–any associate would be able to lay out their own plan in a matter of a few days.

Broken into four sections, Keller covers:

  • making time for rainmaking
  • creating an optimal state of mind–with real, practical advice
  • business development for shy lawyers
  • rainmaking techniques
  • life as an associate

Keller’s book also includes is an amazing collection of sage advice from the top legal minds in the industry. It would cost a fortune to get all these folks into one room to deliver just some of these insights.

Keller collects a wealth of tips, lists, best practices and wise counsel from some of the top rainmakers at Winston Strawn; Latham & Watkins; and Wilson Sonsini as well as CMOs and marketers from K&L Gates; Connolly, Bove Lodge; and Farella Braun + Martel.

So I may defy my own cardinal rule around books and actually deface this one by ripping out its checklists, action sheets and goal sheets.

Well done, David King Keller. Well done.

If you are interested in getting your own copy, you can purchase the book the the American Bar Association. Because I am NOT sharing.

We love to talk about innovation in the legal market on 3 Geeks. Whether its technology, new business models or even just new ways of thinking, we like to explore and share these ideas on 3 Geeks.
Along that line of thinking, the College of Law Practice Management has now opened the door for the 2012 InnovAction Awards that recognize lawyers and firms actually putting this type of innovation in to action.
The award recognizes:
  • Originality: Is this a novel idea or approach, or a new twist on an existing idea or approach?
  • Disruption: Does this entry change an important element of the legal services process for the better, and marketplace expectations along with it?
  • Value: Is the client and/or legal industry better off because of this entry, in terms of the affordability, ease, relevance or effect of legal services?
  • Effectiveness: Has this entry delivered real, demonstrable or measurable benefits, for the provider, its clients, or the marketplace generally
Lawyers and firms are eligible to win this. All you need to do is enter.
Best of luck to all those who compete in this worthwhile program.

I caught the article Why There Are No Bosses at Valve from BusinessWeek today. In my geeky household, developer Valve and their award-winning games (Portal, Half-Life) are very popular, but I never knew that their work environment is as innovative as their games. Of course now I can’t stop thinking about working in a collaborative environment like this within a law firm.

The company’s employee handbook expressly addresses hierarchy and organizational structure. Valve eschews departments, divisions and delineation in favor of self-selected project teams, self-defined “jobs” and delivering value to customers. The message is: “We hire good people to do good work. If you are here, then you know what to do, so jump in and create value for our customers. Don’t worry about the rest.”

Valve Employee Handbook (PDF)
“Valve is not averse to all organizational structure — it crops up in many forms all the time, temporarily. But problems show up when hierarchy or codified divisions of labor either haven’t been created by the group’s members or when those structures persist for long periods of time. We believe those structures inevitably begin to serve their own needs rather than those of Valve’s customers. The hierarchy will begin to reinforce its own structure by hiring people who fit its shape, adding people to fill subordinate support roles. Its members are also incented to engage in rent-seeking behaviors that take advantage of the power structure rather than focusing on simply delivering value to customers.”

The handbook also addresses what Valve is not very good at – namely, tracking performance and training n00bs. But a training and monitoring program is not the environment the company wants to develop – they want to make amazing games with top-flight talent – so they’re mostly fine with the trade-off. How different is that approach from the ages-old guild apprentice system still in use at most law firms? This model moves away from government-type job descriptions (Records Clerk II) and into a solutions-focused and empowered employee population.

With 300 employees, Valve has found a balance that works without a bureaucratic infrastructure. I wouldn’t argue that every industry or company could pull this off but we can take some of the best parts. Many law firms could follow this example with independent projects teams among staff departments, or an exchange program where team members switch off departments to spend time learning how other groups are working to serve clients – and how they can help. Anything to create more communication and collaboration – and less red tape.

If you’d like to talk more about collaboration, please consider joining our panel Tuesday 5/1 at 11a CDT for Practice Innovations Webinar: How to Collaborate to Drive Revenue and let us know what you think about lemons.

Image [cc] Tulane Public Relations

While visiting the Law Libraries Society of Washington DC chapter (LLSDC) last week, my host, Roger Skalbeck had a group of us sit down for a question and answer session at the group’s town hall meeting. Roger gave us five minutes to cover a question, and then we moved on to the next question regardless of if we had finished addressing the issue or not. It was a lot of fun, and it was challenging to stop talking when his iPhone timer went off… but we did. One of the questions he asked us, however, has stuck in the back of my mind, and I wanted to address it for a couple more minutes here on the blog, and hopefully get some responses from the readership as well.

Should Law Schools Teach Students (legal research) Processes or Products?

Is it enough to teach legal research skills to law students in ways that make them proficient in jumping from legal resource to legal resource, or are firms really wanting newly minted lawyers to be very good at specific tools like WestlawNext, or Lexis Advance? Of course, most of us in the room picked item “B” from the list and said that it is better to teach them the skills that can be used regardless of the product they end up using at the firm. That sounds good on paper, but in reality it is becoming harder and harder to identify what makes up those skills in today’s legal research environment. The skills that worked well in Lexis and Westlaw’s web based products, may not transfer very well to the latest generation of WestlawNext or Lexis Advance. Many students would argue that being proficient in ‘Google-Like’ searching is a much more valuable skill than the Boolean and keyword searching we’ve been teaching for the past twenty-plus years.

If the process of searching is changing, should law schools start focusing on teaching more specific skills based on the big two products of Westlaw and Lexis? One member of the audience chimed in and reminded us that even those two products are now really four products once you brought in the new generations platforms. Not only that, but now there’s Bloomberg Law that is making a play for the law student’s attention. Just with these three players, there are five different platforms, and that’s before you start adding in the secondary resources that may or may not work within those platforms.

My comment on this topic actually took a different angle and suggested what I know to be nearly impossible for law schools to teach their students – don’t let students fall into the vendor’s trap of only learning one platform. The law student that finds him or herself at the end of their third year of law school that hasn’t activated their Lexis ID because they like to use Westlaw better (or vice-versa) has played into the hands of the vendor at the expense of their own experience. Those students that go to their Summer Associate jobs this year and use their Bloomberg passwords to do firm work (which apparently Bloomberg is allowing them to do), is making a tactical error in their understanding how the law firm works, recovers costs, and tracks expenses of the work performed. Students should take the opportunity to learn a broad variety of resources while in school because never again will they have access to so many platforms with no pressure to think about the cost of the product.

Is there a best practices when it comes to teaching law students how to use legal research tools? Is it simply a matter of picking process or product, or is there something else that we should be teaching them? What would you teach?

I recently got the issue of Bloomberg Businessweek routed to me and was quite intrigued by many of the segments included in their Second Annual How To Issue, an issue that the publisher describes as “…a cocktail party…[that’s]…all about the mix of guests.”  Although not all of the segments were relevant to the different roles I play within my firm, there were many that were, including:

  • How To…

Probably based on things that are at the forefront of my mind right now, there were two segments that really resonated with me.  The first one was How To…Design a Logo.  The author, Sagi Haviv, works for a firm that designed many iconic logos, including those for NBC (peacock), Chase (octagon), and National Geographic (rectangle).  The main question he says has to be asked when looking to design a logo is “What problem is our client trying to solve?”  Many companies think the need a new logo, when really what they need is to refresh or change their marketing, messaging or packaging related to their existing logo.  Logos should change when they are too complex or are no longer relevant.  Your logo needs to be appropriate, relevant, simple and memorable and the challenge here is how do you make a logo memorable and still keep it simple.  Another related issue to logos that the author didn’t go into involves tag lines.  Once you have a logo, you need to ask whether it needs a tag line.  If so, I think the guidelines that Haviv sets out for logos also apply – tag lines also need to be appropriate, relevant, simple and memorable.  If you are thinking about rebranding (or branding) your library, keep these things in mind as you think about and develop a logo and tag line.

The second segment that struck me was How To…Do A How To and this segment, written by Martha Stewart, is what inspired this blog post title.  Martha’s advice boils down to simplifying your instructions, keep it to as few steps as possible and add embellishments later.  If instructions get too complex, people will get disengaged and discouraged and possibly even give up.  And, finally, Martha hates PowerPoint decks and suggests doing something more innovative.  Many of us have access to software and resources to create more interactive tutorials or video content, but they do take more time and effort to create.  However, if the payoff is people actually paying attention to them and learning how to do something that will help them be more effective at their jobs, isn’t it worth it to abandon the PowerPoint or, for that matter, Word document with screen shots?  Whether it is making a souffle or cite checking a brief, simple clear instructions presented in a new, creative way may very well turn people into better cooks and researchers, respectively.

I recently stumbled upon an alternative pricing scheme that I instinctively felt was wrong.  The details are irrelevant, but I was struck by how vastly different the attorney’s point of view was from my own.  So I tried to expand my viewpoint and to see the problem from all sides.  I came up with three questions that I needed to answer and I sent them to the smartest, most knowledgeable people I know.  Their answers below:

1.      What do attorneys think they sell to clients?
·         Top notch expertise and experience in a specific legal field.
·         Expert advice, not available from anyone else in the industry, business expertise. 
·         Their special skills, unique only to them.  Or there’s the old quote from Lincoln, “A lawyer’s time and advice are his stock-in-trade.”
·         Legal advice that is based on expertise and experience.
·         Most – Knowledge of the law.  Some – Solution to a business problem. 
·         Themselves
·         Confidence
2.      What do law firms think they sell to clients?
·         Top notch legal services.
·         Professional services, expertly crafted advice and a business partnership
·         Their name.
·         Expert legal advice that addresses client needs
·         Experts in the law. 
·         Legal Services
·         Expertise
3.      What do clients think they are buying?
·         An expensive service that they had to purchase because of their risk exposure, but would rather not… (they also think that any big firm like ours is chalk full of experts, but they know lawyer “x” from previous work and decided to stick with them.)
·         An overpriced, but necessary evil service/commodity
·         Someone who can solve their problems.
·         A way to minimize risk or to solve a problem
·         Solution to a business problem. 
·         Security
·         Solutions
Within this group of respondents there is a lot of agreement.  That may point to some underlying truths, or it may be an example of selection bias on my part. I don’t claim this is a scientific result, but the most interesting aspect of these responses is that they all indicate that each party (attorney, client, and firm) is entering into the same sales transaction with a different understanding of the commodity that is being transacted. 

It seems to me that many of the problems plaguing modern law firms may be the result of different answers to these three questions.  If I go to a fishmonger, and he thinks he’s selling fish, I think I’m buying beef, and the sign out front reads, “Fresh Flowers!”, then we are going to have trouble communicating effectively and the Fish Shop is going to have trouble staying in business.  Maybe, if we can identify a single commodity that all parties agree is being transacted at a law firm, then we can focus on building the necessary internal structures, communication pathways, and marketing apparatuses to support the sale of that commodity.

Of course, you can semantically sidestep this problem by answering all questions extremely specifically (a merger agreement) or extremely generally (legal services), but that doesn’t seem like a satisfying solution to me.  So I asked my brilliant friends one additional question.

4.      What should law firms actually be selling to clients?
·         A relationship with the client where the firm better understands the overall needs of the client (not just legal, but pricing, communications, etc.) and builds upon the relationship in a way that results in the client trusting the firm.
·         Law firms should actually be selling a relationship, and a series of tools/opinions to expedite the legal process for securities, contracts etc. and effectively manage risk.
·         Their skills as problem-solvers. Good business development and competitive intelligence is based on the premise that lawyers are not salesmen (or -women).  Rather, it shows them what the client or prospective clients problems are and allows the attorneys to showcase their skills as problem-solvers.
·         A partnership that integrates the client needs with expertise and tools in order to manage risk and solve problems.
·         Business problem solvers. 
·         Solutions
·         Relationships
A “problem solving relationship” isn’t a bad answer to all of the first three questions, but paying for a “relationship” (especially by the hour) feels a little sketchy.  As good customer service representatives, attorneys understand the importance of maintaining a good relationship with the client, but I don’t think that the relationship itself is the commodity being sold.  I think I would say the attorney and the firm are selling the client access to the collective knowledge and expertise of the firm.  The key word being “collective”.  If “collective knowledge and expertise” is our commodity, then that has far-reaching implications for the ways we communicate internally and externally, for the ways we bill our clients and pay our employees, and for the ways we manage our firms.

If not “collective knowledge and expertise”, what is the commodity supplied by firms and purchased by clients?  How would you answer the questions?

So much for Bloomberg Law’s transparency in pricing! If the statement below from the April 23, 2012 Law Librarian Blog post “Blaw Makes Its Push into Law Schools” is accurate it appears BLaw pricing transparency is out the window as there is a different price for law school libraries versus law firm libraries.

“Any school that subscribes to the BNA Premier Service will receive a significant discount on their subscription charge and free access to Bloomberg Law.”  

And the main requirement for getting this pricing is the law school must provide parity in promotion of the BLaw service similar to the law schools promotion of Lexis and Westlaw!
Seems unfair to me! Law firms have to ultimately pay $356/user/month to move their BNA content to the BLaw platform and law schools get it for free and they also get a big discount on their BNA subscription charges

I’ve had a number of conversations over the past couple of years about the information that lawyers place on their LinkedIn pages versus there law firm attorney profile pages. As someone that prides themselves on the ability to uncover good information on people, I’ve come to appreciate the information found on LinkedIn. Many times there is more detailed information there than is on the firm bio page, most likely because the attorneys are not filtered (as much) by the Marketing team when it comes to their LinkedIn information.

It is quite easy to search law firm websites and find the attorneys, along with their sanitized biographies. Usually chalked full of such interesting tid-bits like “represented a major technology company in complex litigation matters.” (yawn) Or, “won a $20 million settlement for a major pharmaceutical company against another major pharmaceutical company.” (any way to make this more generic, or more boring??) The whole process of a public biography page for attorneys seems to be fixated on how the firm can make the attorney sound wonderful, without actually giving any specific details to why that is.

On the other hand, a LinkedIn bio can tell us a few things that you may not find on the firm’s bio page. Even better, it could actually supplement the bio page by filling in some of the details. For example, if you notice that the person has a number of connections with XYZ Pharma Company, there may be a good chance that this is the Pharma Company that he or she won the $20 million settlement. This doesn’t always happen, but when it does (and you happen to be looking for lateral hires), this is good information to know.

Perhaps the best details found on LinkedIn pages that you don’t find on law firm bio pages is the work history of the person. You usually get a nice synopsis of the previous firms, dates and areas of expertise of the attorney’s work history. This may help in isolating people within your own firm that may have worked with them in the past. Combined with certain InterAction reports, this might connect dots within your organization that you wouldn’t find otherwise.

Outside the area of legal practice, many people leave interesting pieces of information about themselves that may come in handy if you have to go talk with them (or need an “in” with recruiting them to your firm.) Areas of interest, groups they belong to, or associations which they are members are all good pieces to know before approaching them. In some instances, it might be good information to know for NOT approaching them. It is all small pieces that help form a picture of what the attorney does, what they like or dislike, and where they’ve been.

Of course, not every attorney is a LinkedIn member, but I’ve had good success in finding many who are. So this got me thinking about what percentage of attorneys are on LinkedIn. Just for my own interest, I thought I’d take a small sample of three firms and look at their Silicon Valley offices to see just how many of their attorneys I could find on LinkedIn. The sample is completely unscientific, but I found it interesting in the fact that Partners (78%) were more likely to be on LinkedIn than their Associate (65%) counter-parts. Again, this is completely unscientific, but here are my results.

Firm A
Total Attorneys: 8 
          Partners:   5
          Associates: 3

Firm B
Total Attorneys: 26
          Partners:   8
          Associates: 11
          Counsel:  5
          Others:  2

Firm C
Total Attorneys: 119
          Partners:  69
          Associates: 32
          Counsel:  9
          Others:  9

























Totals:
         Attorneys: 153
         Partners:  82
         Associates: 48
         Counsel:  14
         Others:  11